


Childhood Gone

by Umbreonpanda



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 21:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16879116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbreonpanda/pseuds/Umbreonpanda
Summary: "When she was a child she would cover herself in blankets and pillows and couch cushions."





	Childhood Gone

When she was a child she would cover herself in blankets and pillows and couch cushions.

As heavy as possible. She would close her eyes and let the weight erase her. Until she was a bodiless presence in the dark. It was like not existing at all.  
· · · · ·

One night she became lost and disoriented. She tried to swim towards the surface, and  
smashed her skull against a wall of rock. She bled, and lost track of time. She lost her fins and cut up her feet. But she kept kicking. And, eventually, her thrusts propelled her into a crack in the wall.

The crack became a gorge so thin it threatened to snag and hold her down. Several  
times it grabbed onto her. Several times she almost abandoned her cylinder in hope of  
reaching the surface in one breath. But each time the rocks finally gave way. Until, an infinite amount of time later, she reached a small cavern with stale air and daylight leaking through the ceiling.

She lay supine on the soft, decaying floor, propped against her vest and tank. Staring  
towards the ceiling, she memorized the pattern of the lights, entirely new constellations, and pressed her palms to her still-bleeding head.  
· · · · ·

After a time, she stirs, and makes her way out of the ship’s belly and away from its decaying bones. The fish drifting sleepily within and around the ship are alarmed by this movement, and flee from her. The sight is humorous, and quite sad.

A few meters on, a crab trap. An armful of crabs, moving awkwardly among the  
wires. She peers in. They enthrall her. Blue legs, red-tipped. The colors in their shells clash and contradict, and merge smoothly into one another. Blue and tan and red and orange. So many hues. All of their pieces seem mismatched—jutting claws, soft round legs, curving shell, razor-edged. Calm, determined, jerking creatures. One with a spongy orange belly, carrying eggs. Such an unloved species. Hard and spiked and small and bug like. 

Too foreign to be loved.

She pries the wire flap apart and scoops an arm in, drawing them out. A claw grips the  
edge of her palm, then releases. The crabs reach the freedom of the sandy floor, and retreat.

When she draws her hand up to her mask, a small cut. She pinches it, and watches a wisp of blood float up into the water and dissipate. Blue swallowing red.

· · · · ·

22

Her experience in the gorge stayed with her. It became, to her, the memory of a second  
womb: a smothering reality. A tight, tight grip. And at the end: an emergence as dangerous as any childbirth, and as traumatizing.

As full of possibility.

· · · · ·  
She has left his bedroom for last. A personal task.  
She enters and the door creaks. Most doors creak. But this sound grates into her, as  
though she has dropped a glass, is waiting for the shatter. She walks into the room, stops. She breathes, and listens—to the house, to the walls. To her own pulse.

She hasn’t gone through his things since she was a surreptitious child. She is struck  
now, as she was then, by their foreignness. Men’s clothing has a heaviness that always  
manages to surprise her—a heaviness in the fabric, the stitching, the pockets. The sheer spaciousness of it all. Space women are discouraged from taking. The jackets hang like ghosts in the closet, hovering. These are his things, the shapes he inhabits. 

His skins.

The bedroom door slams shut, jolting her. Prickles on her neck, a deep, heavy bloom  
in her stomach. The windows are open, the wind has blown the door. She is alone in the  
room. But it feels as though a dark man has crept up and shoved her from behind.  
For a long while after, she is left winded, and uneasy.

· · · · ·

She thought of the gorge often, but rarely ventured there. It called back to her like a long-lost, long-resented hometown. A much-loathed lullaby. Her returns were rare, and inevitable.

· · · · ·

She drifts.

The ocean floor is a desert littered with patches of life. Smoky hard corals and sea  
fans and grass. Anemones. Small fish and pale crustaceans and plant like creatures that scatter at her touch. They retreat into the rocks, into the waves, into their shells and  
themselves. 

She has long forgotten the names for these organisms. Names are not needed. Do these creatures care, either way? Odd, to inflict humanity on the world at large. Nature is so indifferent towards you. Either you are a source of destruction. Or nothing at all.

She makes her way eastward, stopping now and again to rest on the ocean floor. She  
uses air luxuriously, as though egging on some sentient fate. Daring the water to take her.

Periodically she rises towards the surface to check the position of the sun.  
By now, she is tired and cold. She ought to surface and warm herself. There is the  
danger of exhaustion and hypothermia. Already she is shaking. It would be unwise to  
continue.

The light from the surface dwindles and disappears. The water goes dark just as she  
rounds a familiar corner. The sun is finally down. The night begins.

She has reached the gorge.

· · · · ·

When you were young, a pair of hands wrapped themselves around your throat. In those few minutes, you forgot how to breathe. You have never relearned. You have lived your life up to

23

this point in one breath. There has been always some weight on your chest. Pressing slowly, deeply, until there was no room in your rib cage.  
· · · · ·

The rest of her journey is guided by flashlight. She slips between the gorge walls, and slides slowly on. She inches through narrow crevices, while the seabed beneath her dips and curves down into black water too deep for her to enter. The flashlight is strapped firmly to her wrist, but over and over she sees the image, behind her eyes, of the strap breaking. The light dropping from her grip, falling away into the bottomless shadow below. Swallowed up. 

And she will be alone, trapped in the dark.

But she knows the walls of this ravine. She has memorized its bumps and bruises. So,  
with hands cold but steady, she grips the light and feels her way forward. And the walls lean in to embrace.

· · · · ·

The last labor. A sliver in the rock. A tight tunnel, all sharp and angled. Make it through and all will be finished. But you won’t make it through. The mouth is too taunt, too toothed. 

You won’t survive this. You will be caught, stuck, surrendered to the water. The walls will pull together and swallow you whole. This is how you die, crushed into non-being. Your bones, your viscera, tendons and tender flesh, erased into a void. Perhaps you never existed at all.

Close your eyes. Hold your breath. Do not move. There is no way back. There is one  
way forward. An instant from now, all things will change. Life will melt. Open your eyes.  
Swim.

· · · · ·

Out of the blue, the corpse appears. Swaying in the water before her eyes. Horror of horrors.

A scraggly, decaying thing. It rests at the greatest depth of the gorge floor, in the brief  
pitfall before the sharp slope up to the tiny air-filled cavern. A mesh fishing net, secured carefully to kelp-covered boulders, pins the carcass to the sandy bottom.  
If she breathes, her throat will collapse. If she looks, her eyes will melt. Still it sways, limp and absent. And she sways with it, letting the current do as it likes. Like this, they survey one another for a time. Eyeless sockets and seeing flesh.

They float. Time moves. Despite our best efforts.  
She goes to him.

· · · · ·

Fear, too much for too long, embeds itself. Erases one of your pieces (many of your pieces, until you are gaping wide open), then shoves itself in and curls up. Plants itself, an invasive species. Unfolds, grows roots, coils its way along your fibers. Sits on your spine, for years, and plugs itself behind your eyes. A second nervous system. A part of your fundamental self, essential to your existence.

You carry it around (a fleshy parasite, gripping you) but it does not throb as once it did. It is too familiar to burn fresh. You have scarred and thickened, you are protected. 

You cannot feel. This allows you to survive. And wears you down over time.  
Hollow things are prone to cave-ins.

24

· · · · ·

She shot him in the garage, over a tarp. She placed it by the door, as an afterthought, while  
she was waiting, gun in hand.

He taught her to shoot, in childhood. She was a good shot. Not dedicated, not interested, but with a natural aim. She liked guns. She hated guns. She enjoyed aiming, pulling the trigger. Delighted in the act of destruction. Regretted the aftermath.

He wasn’t expecting her. He had no idea she was there. She waited like a ghost and he  
came in to investigate the noise. She shot twice. Once, to the chest, and then again. An afterthought.

Not a cold-blooded killing. Not warm-blooded. Done in a trance: dizzy, nauseous.  
Resigned. A course that was set for them, by decades of circumstances beyond her consent.

· · · · ·

It’s been a year. The corpse is much decayed. The bones peer through. It wears no clothes, only a half-present skin. She nears, twisting the mesh netting around her fingers to hold herself against the current. As she approaches, fish flee. The cartilage of the sternum has been eaten away, leaving a gaping hole at the center. The ribs are intact, but exposed. There is so little of him left.

She peers into the rib cage, positioning the flashlight to illuminate the empty pit. She wants to reach in, pull something out. There’s nothing there. She grips around what were once his shoulders, and shakes, shakes, shakes.

· · · · ·

After he bled out in front of her (murmuring, briefly, barely), it was left to her to clean up the wreckage.

Flesh can disappear (in the water, most anything can). Epidermis and dermis first, in  
patches, in pieces. Loosened by the bloat. Subcutaneous tissue next. The soft gummy yellow of fat. Bitten away gently to expose muscles, tendons. Lastly, organs: a soft feast which lasts no time at all.

They say bones will tell. She disagrees. Bones are nothing. Bones are a lingering. Let him surface now, a skeleton embarrassed in its state of undress. Let the remains be discovered, and they will be silent. They will not deny that he drowned, another innocent taken by the sea.

They say the past always catches up to you. That grits on her. A lazy, placating lie.  
One in three murders goes unsolved, never mind our innumerable other sins. People go  
unpunished every day, every minute. It isn’t hard, not the way it should be.

· · · · ·

There are monsters in dark waters. You cannot breathe, you cannot see. You are a child. You are a speck. The water is on you, the pressure of an ocean. Tentacles reach out and close in.

You are tangled in bed sheets, sweating and choking. You are in the dark beyond, swallowing water. Water and salt and fear, gushing all through your nose, your throat, your lungs. The monster tightens its grip.

· · · · ·

25

One shot to the chest, one to the face. And now there is no face, no chest. Just absences. She finishes her examination and pulls away from the corpse. She moves to the edge of the net, tugs tenderly at the knots until they give way. Pulls the mesh from the sand, folds and sets it to the side. 

Looks skywards and pushes herself gently away from the floor. She rises a few meters to examine the boulders of the slope. Gingerly, she sorts through the rocks until she finds one which suits her needs. It is not much larger than a man’s skull. A good size, a good weight. She has found the stone upon which she will build. She inflates her vest slightly, grabs onto the rock. 

Slowly, she lets it drag her back to the bottom of the pit. She hovers just above the corpse, takes aim, and thrusts the stone into its skull. Through the water, she hears the grinding of shells, bones. She tilts the boulder to the side, rummages around the debris. Picks out a shard, reverently, and tucks it carefully into a pouch at her waist.

A memento? Trophy? Trinket? A child collecting shells from the beach. Sand by the handfuls. Trying to grasp something that can’t be kept. So it’s finished. He can surface now, dragged up by the currents. A victim of the sea, returned to land.

· · · · ·

There are hands around your throat. They have been there for years. Tightening when you shut your eyes. Fingers tearing through your windpipe. Until you cannot even choke, only sink, and feel yourself flattened. The oldest daydream. Drifting in and out of sleep, seeing yourself smothered to unconsciousness, and beyond. A mantra: Choke me, drown me, hold me down. Smother me, strangle me. Swallow me whole.

· · · · ·

Let it be over.

She sits down beside the body. She contemplates lying there until the air runs out.  
If she were to choose to die, this is the death she would choose. Lying here, on the  
ocean floor, staring up. The weight of the water firm on her chest. The air leaving her. Those black waters pooling in to surround her. An engulfing death.

She raises her hands and folds them around her throat. Tightens her grip. All she can  
hear is water, and her pulse like a stethoscope. Dark spots float behind her eyes.  
Probably she will do it one night. It is not yet that night.


End file.
